Results

Resonance is a series of sound interventions for a specific site, activating the acoustic and historical space in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Sabatini Building. The programme refrains from using the auditorium and electronic amplification, which means guest artists, musicians and composers will present a series of pieces that set in motion alternative contexts for sound and contemporary music.

In relation to the exhibition Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, this series of lectures offers a context for the discussion on the reframing of documentary culture in the 1970s and 1980s. The programme brings together international scholars to debate some of the key aspects of the exhibition from different perspectives.

This seminar sets out to rewrite the history of post-war art in Europe, traditionally presented as the disjointed amalgamation of art scenes divided into antagonistic blocks. By deconstructing national limits and articulating a transversal debate, this programme presents a divergent and collaborative history, whilst also identifying new voices and positions.

After organising activities with Merce Cunningham and Simone Forti, the Museo presents the choreographer and dancer Steve Paxton (USA, 1939), a central figure in the development of contemporary dance and the creator of contact improvisation. On this occasion Bound, a solo devised by Paxton, will be performed, for the first time in Spain, by the dancer Jurij Konjar,who will also hold a workshop.

The Internet has produced new behaviours, subjectivities and institutions linked to another way of being and doing. This seminar debates how these changes throw established categories of art, the author and the circulation of unique work off balance, whilst also forming profound contradictions – from creativity as an economic value to indistinct work time. Is considering another artistic ecosystem possible from these ambiguities?

Luis Ospina has directed some of the most incisive and critical films on the identity stereotypes that are still prevalent in Colombia and, by extension, Latin America. Setting out from the term “porno-misery”, his films explicitly speak out against the use of violence and poverty as representation and spectacle. This series, with the film-maker present, serves as an introduction to his work.

Travelling Exhibitions: The Production of Circuits, Routes and Collaborative Networks

Seminars and conferences
Seminar

Organize with the occasion of ARCOmadrid, this meeting aims to provide a space for reflection where art professionals working in museums and contemporary art centres can exchange ideas about the possibilities that this exhibition format offers to their institutions.

This activity introduces conversations, a new series of twice-monthly dialogues and lectures that open up a new space aside from the research conducted by the Museo. In this first instalment, Thelma Golden and artists Theaster Gates and Glenn Ligon debate the recent shift in the politics of race and representation in the United States.

In conversation with Jorge Ribalta

Seminars and conferences
Conference
Encounter

This encounter brings together Martha Rosler (New York, 1943) and the historian and theorist of photography Jorge Ribalta. The activity signals the start of the exhibition Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernity and looks to debate some of the question marks it raises.

This film series presents a selection of work by Gregory J. Markopoulos (1928-1992), who made some of the most subjective and allegorical film poetics in post-war experimental cinema. With four sessions screened in both La Casa Encendida and the Museo Reina Sofía, Film as Film explores the keys to a sensual and excessive body of work, in which homosexual identity, initiation rites and allegory circle around complex editing techniques.

In conversation with Manuel Borja-Villel and Iris Dressler

Seminars and conferences
Conference
Encounter

This encounter sees Daniel G. Andújar engage in conversation with the curator of the exhibition, Manuel Borja-Villel, and a critic with extensive knowledge of his output, Iris Dressler, to look at some of the key aspects of the artist’s work. The role of the artist in the new cultural ecosystem and the Internet as a utopian, and also repressive, space are some of the themes touched upon.

Can strategies of capital be replicated to build horizontal social dynamics? As part of an action in the Really Useful Knowledge exhibition, artists Núria Güell and Levi Orta donate bank accounts in tax havens to a group of activists, who will use this route to attack the system that produces it. The project culminates in this seminar, which is organised by both artists.

This encounter serves as an introduction to the site-specific installation The Marionette Maker (Palacio de Cristal, from 19 November to 16 March, 2015), and the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller as a whole, with both artists engaging in conversation with João Fernandes, the curator of the project and deputy director of the Museo Reina Sofía.

Eclectic, poppy, sophisticated, the music of Arto Lindsay evokes reverse trajectories and unexpected influences. Educated in Brazil during the emergence of Tropicália in the 1970s, Lindsay added the references and characteristics of this broad cultural movement in Brazil, focused on diluting art in a multifarious and impalpable experience, to the No Wave scene in the USA.

Specters: A Ciné-politics of Haunting gathers a selection of recent international film and video that conjures the hauntings of our collective cultural imaginary. Some phantoms arise from past injustices and political traumas, some apparitions, of catastrophic times to come.

Lecture held by Francisco Reyes Palma

Seminars and conferences
Encounter

This lecture offers a journey through the work of Mathias Goeritz as it introduces the expansive retrospective exhibition the Museo is devoting to the artist. The creator of both syncretic and original work, after 1940 Goeritz would reformulate European geometric abstraction through ancestral pre-Hispanic tradition and a new sense of the public sphere.

A programme of actions and activities within the context of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, devised by the collective Subtramas (Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní and Virginia Villaplana). These actions take place inside the galleries of the exhibition and feature participation from different social and cultural collectives.

Within the framework of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, artist Trevor Paglen and journalist and programmer Jacob Appelbaum debate the increase of government surveillance and the way in which this affects people’s freedom and their ability to act.

This encounter serves as an introduction to the Juan Luis Moraza exhibition republic in the Museo (15 October, 2014 - 2 March, 2015), bringing together the artist and João Fernandes, the curator of the exhibition and deputy director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a public conversation.

This film season continues a series of programmes that have addressed the change to structures, narrations and methods of film-making in recent Spanish cinema. With three editions to date, The Memory of Disrepute develops, through double sessions, how other cinema invents its own genealogy, exercising a discontinuous and partisan history of recent cinema.

Art and popular culture in a world undergoing a transformation

Seminars and conferences
Seminar

Appropriating the theme raised by Richard Hamilton in his well-known 1956 collage, this seminar examines the crossover between artistic practices and popular culture that gave rise to multiple phenomena associated with Pop Art. With participation from Kerstin Stakemeier, Eloy Fernández Porta, Diedrich Diederichsen and Benjamin Buchloh.

At the border between genres

Live Arts
Modern dance

Short Dance Films is a touring programme that includes a selection of forty-five short dance films produced in Europe in recent years. It is curated by Núria Font/NU2’s, commissioned by the European Dancehouse Network, a network with the participation of 20 dance houses from 16 countries.

This programme presents pop confronting pop, recognising the seduction of consumer culture whilst also keeping it at a critical distance. In relation to the exhibition devoted to Richard Hamilton, this series approaches the popular as subversion and as an investigation into the characteristics of a new society that emerged between the 1950s and 1970s.

Performing Gender is a European project that takes a critical look at the politics of gender and sexuality using dance and performance tools. Bodies and their multiple gender inscriptions are the subject of exploration and experimentation by a group of artists that, over the course of one year, have carried out their research by touring around different European institutions.

Active in the UK between 1982 and 1997, the Black Audio Film Collective symbolised a radical attempt to transform education, institutions and the representation of black identity in independent film, with their work condensing a complex palimpsest of voices that, found between nascent politics of representation, put forward a language of diaspora.

This activity introduces the artist’s first individual exhibition in Europe, Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (13 June – 26 October, 2014), as he presents his work as an analysis of Afro-American racial identity and the space of the black subject, both in the current social context and in official history.

Within the framework of the Museo Reina Sofía 2013-2014 residencies, the collective 15Muebles presents urban teaching based on an open code: Ciudad Escuela, a gateway and invitation to ways of discovering, learning about and making a city.

Premiere of the recent documentary about Hélio Oiticica. Put together as a living archive of numerous unpublished documents, from the artist’s thoughts as a narrative guide to unexplored audiovisual fragments, the film looks to articulate a complex and multiple narrative of the artist and the post-war Avant-garde movement in Brazil.

Reinventing the Square

Seminars and conferences
Workshop

This workshop sets out from the discourse and works that articulate the exhibition Playgrounds in order to relate them to experiences of urban intervention in Madrid; a three-way exercise in active dialogue between the Museo, the participating audience and contemporary playgrounds.